


The Psychology of Loss

by EssayOfThoughts



Series: MCU Maximoff Oneshots [77]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Codependency, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Loss of Control of Powers due to Trauma, Loss of Telepathy due to Trauma, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-29
Updated: 2016-05-29
Packaged: 2018-07-10 20:58:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7006591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She can still see minds though. Not reflected - that’s not how they can be perceived, not to seeing eyes, only <i>only</i> to the mind - but she refuses to enter them, cannot, dares not.</p><p>To enter another mind would hurt, would mean seeing them, knowing them, <i>feeling</i> them (feeling her brother’s pain, his fear, hearing his screaming in her mind as he fell, fighting, into the dark chaos of death).</p><p>Wanda cannot do that again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Psychology of Loss

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TobermorianSass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TobermorianSass/gifts).



> This is riffing off both the wonderful fic [_Soldier, Weapon, Stranger, Monster_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6786394) from TobermorianSass and my previous Oneshot [_Day by Day_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6833881). 
> 
> But mostly this is from me wondering why we don't see Wanda using her mental abilities in CACW,, and coming up with a theory for it.

**i.  
** Wanda looks at the scarlet curling out of her shaking hands. This is what she holds within herself: world-rending, world- _warping_  power.

Power which twisted its way out of her without control, without command, when she felt her brother die. Her hands, still shaking, close. Scarlet wisps away to nothing as she draws in a leaden breath, and another, and then another past the lump that fills her throat. 

She looks out of the window, at the dust cloud that is all that remains of a good third of her city, and knows she cannot let her power out like that again.

It takes her three weeks before she lets herself use her scarlet again.

 

* * *

 

 **ii.**  
Her scarlet is _hers_. It matters not that it was awoken in her by the sceptre, it is _hers_ , as easy and instinctive to her as P– 

As her brother’s speed had been to him. 

Sometimes, if she is angry or upset, it wants to get out, wants to express itself like an emotion, twist its way free of the iron hold she has on it, make itself dance into the world and lash out and tear apart all things around her, to express itself as emotions do.

Wanda tugs it in. Wanda binds it with more iron until it is soothed again to grief and loss and mourning.

With Ultron dead, with no one to direct anger towards, it makes her scarlet complacent, and she would much rather not have to wrestle with that which is a part of herself.

 

* * *

 

 **iii.**  
This is how she mourns. The line of black drawn precisely beneath her lashes - for beauty, once, and then for battle and now, now for her brother - and she holds her scarlet in so tightly she cannot even see it glowing from her eyes in the mirror. 

She can still see minds though. Not reflected - that’s not how they can be perceived, not to seeing eyes, only _only_ to the mind - but she refuses to enter them, cannot, dares not.

To enter another mind would hurt, would mean seeing them, knowing them, _feeling_  them (feeling her brother’s pain, his fear, hearing his screaming in her mind as he fell, fighting, into the dark chaos of death).

Wanda cannot do that again.

Wanda stays out of the realm of minds.

 

* * *

 

 **iv.**  
Physical though... it takes her three weeks to work to it, but when she does it is as easy and as natural as it became to her once she’d had time to practice. Like learning to walk, once learned it cannot be forgotten. Her hand flicks out, scarlet spreads, and her hairbrush thwacks into her hand.

 _I can do this_ , she thinks, even as she shutters her mind’s eyes to other minds.

(That, that she dares not do. She cannot bear to feel another person hurting, another person dying, another person torn from her as her brother had been.)

 

* * *

 

 **v.**  
She practices with her scarlet - physical only and the Captain and the Widow never ask more from her than that. Sometimes she sees fear in the Widow’s eyes when they talk of the scope of her powers. Sometimes she sees something almost like hope in the Captain’s. 

Wanda closes her eyes and looks away.

 _I will not go into minds again_ floats through her mind, the words on the tip of her tongue.

“I cannot go into minds again,” is what she says, awkward English but certain in meaning. “I _cannot_.”

 

* * *

 

 **vi.**  
They accept her word. They each, she suspects, come up with reasons as to why she cannot enter minds any more. She can list a myriad off the top of her head - lost with her brother, only from synergy with her brother’s power, lost with the mind stone embedded in the Vision’s brow, more and more and more until she finds herself spiralling through the complex layers of probability that give her as much a headache as mental voices do.

They come up with their own reasons, though, and that is what matters. None of them ask her why. None of them intrude her mourning.

 _I am sorry_ , she thinks, towards the scattered blue memories of her brother. He would tease her for this she knows, mock her gently until scarlet danced out of her fingers and connected their minds again.

 _I don’t fear you_ , was always his promise. _I never will._

The team fears her. The team always will.

 

* * *

 

 **vii.**  
She had forgotten that the world fears her too.

 _Weapon of mass destruction_. Wanda has seen what such weapons can do. Has seen her country torn apart by war and corruption and lies, seen the news of places gassed or destroyed by illegal black market energy weapons, seen her home torn into the air by a robot and vaporised to try to save the world.

Wanda has seen what such weapons can do.

 

* * *

 

 **viii.**  
Wanda isn’t such a weapon. That is her promise, over and over again, like the scarlet that links and locks and flows over her hand like watery coils of thread, over and over as though making a reel. _I can’t hurt people again_. She doesn’t go into minds - won’t, _can’t_ \- and that protects them from her eaves-seeing their thoughts, from her meddling with their nightmares, from bringing up traumas and fears all as deeply scarring as her own. She tames her scarlet, trains it to painful, perfect precision - she has none of the perfect _freedom_  she had with her brother, the understanding balance to guide her like instinct, not any more - until she can guide gusts of air, move objects near and far and not have to send scarlet visible between her and the target.

(She sees the fear in the Widow’s eyes when she learns to do that. Wanda doesn’t have to read minds to know what the spy-assassin thought: _A weapon you can’t see coming_ )

Wanda does not want to be a weapon.

 

* * *

 

 **ix.**  
To save lives, that is why she is with the Avengers. Not to make amends - she fought Ultron with them for that purpose, and lost her brother as some painful price from the world - but to save lives. To do good. To save Novi Grad and every place like it, to prevent Ultrons and Struckers and Lists and all men like them, those who would be gods.

 _There is no G-d_ , Wanda thinks. _Maybe once, maybe to make this all, but He cannot be any longer._ Scarlet turns over and over in her hands like blood. _That or He does not care._

The idea of a G-d without care makes Wanda’s bile rise.

 

* * *

 

 **x.**  
To save lives. To save lives, protect the innocent, prevent evil. That is why the Avengers exist. She knows why they were named - to Avenge the world for what has been done, and she wonders if, maybe, that is why they are so bad at _preventing_  anything.

They could not prevent Crossbones. They could not prevent the attack, the theft, the deaths.

Even her scarlet binding explosion into explosion, forbidding the force of his bomb from hurting anyone but him had had to cave and break and allow the deaths of eleven people all the same.

 _You saved lives_ , that is what her brother would say. _You saved lives, and it was Crossbones who took them_.

Her brother isn’t here. Her brother is dead.

Wanda sits, shaking in the shower, tracing her brother’s name in the condensation, letter by letter, Roman alphabet, Cyrillic, Hebrew. P-I-E-T-R-O. 

Dead. What good is she for saving lives if she could not even save her brother? What good is her scarlet if people only hate her for it? What good is her life if she can do no good with it? 

(Wanda curls in the shower, scarlet wisping around her like smoke, and cries.)

 

* * *

 

 **xi.**  
_Weapons of mass destruction don’t get visas_.

Stark calls her that again and he says it so casually she almost misses it. 

Almost. 

She suspects this is how he gets away with being so insulting and yet called so charming - insulting people so casually they barely notice.

(Wanda has always noticed, noticed what people said about her and her brother, what they said about their faith and then their lack of it, about their powers, their synchronicity, about her standing on her own after it all. Wanda has always noticed.)

 _It is all they will ever see me as_ , she thinks. _All I will ever be to them_.

Her brother would have fought. Her brother would have found the drive to keep going, his insistence on protecting her giving him the energy to continue on and change minds. If it had been him called a Weapon she would have done the same.

He isn’t here. No one is. Wanda goes to her room, closes her eyes and tries not to despair completely.

 

* * *

 

 **xii.**  
_Clint_ , Wanda remembers when the archer arrives. Clint doesn’t fear her. Vision doesn’t fear her because it never occurs to him to, he is too innocent, too naive, too _young_  (it is this and only this which prevents her from hurting him when she realises he has been made her gaoler). Clint doesn’t fear her because he refuses to, holds his fear and tames it to purpose just as she and and her brother always had.

He says _It’s time to get off your ass_. 

What he means is _There is more than this_. What he means is _You don’t have to stand back and let it happen_.

What he means is _You are more than a weapon._

Wanda’s scarlet could outshine the sun.

 

* * *

 

 **xiii.**  
_I do not want to hurt you_ , she thinks as she sends Vision through the floor. 

 _I do not want to kill you_ , she thinks as she sends car after car after Stark.

 _I want to be **free** , _she thinks in the middle of Leipzig airport.

She is never going to be free. Even Vision, barely understanding why she fought, can see that.

 

* * *

 

 **xiv.**  
Wanda learns the rules of the Raft quickly.

_You make scarlet, we tase you. Your eyes glow, we tase you. You try to move, you so much as **twitch** , we tase you._

Wanda cannot even brush hair out of her face, cannot summon scarlet to help her block out the minds she does not wish to see, lest the small round burns on her neck be added to.

 

* * *

 

 **xv.  
** Do not move. Do not shift, do not blink, do not breathe. Wanda stares at the wall and watches the movement of minds she so wishes to be blind to. 

They had wanted power when they had signed up, yes. Wanted the power to take vengeance for their parents, bring peace to their country, make right the wrongs done to them.

(Two days, choking on brick dust, rubble and mortar shattered around them, only her brother’s arms around her to anchor her to the world. Only Pietro to anchor her. Only herself to anchor Pietro.)

(There is no Pietro now. There is nothing now.)

In the depths of her mind Wanda is screaming.

 

* * *

 

 **xvi.**  
Scarlet coils. Scarlet wisps. Scarlet warps out in circles and stars and ropes and serpents. It can be a skirt of silk, a flick of power, a connecting thread as red as fate. It can lift concrete, contain smoke, hurl an exploding man metres into the air. It can let her see minds, connect to them, warp them with fear and dread and nightmares.

It can be all of those things, do all of those things, but whatever Wanda tries it isn’t.

Safe, safe in Wakanda, her scarlet refuses to come to her.

 

* * *

 

 **xvii.**  
Her scarlet is _hers_. Her scarlet is hers as her brother’s speed had been his - ( _Pietro_ , whispers her mind, soft as a memory. _Pietro_ ) - it obeys _her_ , is bound only to _her_.

Once given it cannot be taken back.

Wanda flicks her fingers, twists her hands, focusses on rage and anger and loss and despair, focusses on freedom and hope and the love she held for her brother and for Novi Grad, but nothing comes forth.

(She can feel it, coiling beneath her skin like eels in water, dying to feed. She can feel it twisting like rope, burning into her bones with the friction but she cannot let it out.)

(It doesn’t want to be let out.)

( _She_  doesn’t want to let it out.)

Wanda’s scarlet sits, burning in her chest, and she cannot touch it any more than she can minds.

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave comments!


End file.
